Uncertainty, Wildness, and Wonder: A Conversation with Mary Otis
Los Angeles based writer and fiction professor, Mary Otis, published her first novel, Burst (Zibby Books, 2023) this spring. Burst won the 2023 Silver Medal in Literary Fiction from the Independent Book Publisher Awards and was a Good Morning America and New York Post “Best Books of Spring” pick. Her previous book was a short story collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries. Her stories, essays, and poetry have been published in Best New American Voices, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, McSweeney’s, and many other literary journals. The New York Times has said of her writing, “Sadness and humor sidle up to each other, evocative of the delicate balance of melancholy and wit found in Lorrie Moore’s stories.”
Burst introduces readers to Viva and Charlotte—a mother/daughter duo living on the fraught edge of creativity. Mary’s early experiences in modern dance and theater at Bennington College and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York influenced the development of these characters. “So many things I learned relative to acting transfer well to writing—understanding a character’s interior life, their desires, their struggles, secrets, how they move, and speak . . . that kind of freedom is very compelling to me.” This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Jennie Burke: Can you talk about your first book, Yes, Yes, Cherries (Tin House)? What was the inspiration, and how did you connect with Tin House as your publisher? Was the collection finished before you reached out to publishers? How did that experience differ from having your work acquired by Zibby Books?
Mary Otis: Yes, Yes, Cherries came to fruition in a unique way. I was writing short stories and had placed a few of them in literary journals. Tin House (when they published a lit journal) acquired two of them and then asked if I had written an entire collection. I hadn’t at that point, but they offered me a book deal with the agreement that I would write three or four more stories to include, which I did. My agent, Sarah Bowlin, sent the Burst manuscript to Zibby Books, and it was acquired shortly after that by Leigh Newman. Zibby Books is remarkable in its innovative approaches to marketing, reader engagement, and author participation, and it’s wonderful to be published among such a diverse range of voices.
JB: Can you discuss the arc of emotions you experienced writing Burst?
MO: Burst originated from my short story, “Flight,” a story that sprang from the image of a mother madly driving down the freeway with a child in the back seat. Once it was published, I thought I was done with the characters, but apparently, they weren’t done with me. It was a favorable and urgent haunting, one that provoked me to write more material about Viva and Charlotte. These early scenes and passages (which I wrote completely out of order) were crucial in that they helped me to begin to feel my way through Burst. These two characters arrived as a package deal, and they always traveled together. However, in the short story version, the narrative is told only from Viva’s point of view. By the time I was considering expanding it into a novel, Charlotte was determined to have her say as well.
Whenever I’m writing a character, I’m completely on their side in terms of motivations (what they want, hope for, fear, and how they see the world). So, I experience their feelings while I’m writing about their lives, but those might be quite different from my own on any given day. It’s almost like being in a play.
JB: Speaking of emotions, what experiences of your own informed the mother/daughter relationship in Burst? I know you mentioned that Charlotte is not based on your own mother but what informs your understanding of the mother/daughter relationship?
MO: Charlotte’s is an amalgam of a number of mothers I knew growing up. Also, a dear friend generously shared some stories of her early years being on the road with her mother. Although those stories are not directly written about in the novel, I wanted to capture the deep sense of uncertainty, the wildness, and the wonder she described. I’m not a mother, but I’ve been a daughter (I grew up in a family of six kids) and I’ve been in a number of positions in my life where I played a mentoring or mothering role.
I’ve written a number of stories from a child’s point of view, which, to me, offers the opportunity to access a kind of “clear channel radio” to the subconscious. With children, there is that immediacy, lack of a filter, and there are extremely high stakes (even if the stakes are forgotten five minutes later). The writer Penelope Fitzgerald once said, “I like to bring in children because they introduce a different scale of judgment, probably based on the one we taught them but which we never intended to be taken literally.” I find that very funny and true.
Writing dual narratives of this mother/daughter story allowed me to present both sides of their stories. Following them over almost 30 years enabled me to explore them in depth. It was also important for my reader to learn about Charlotte as a young woman, to see who she was before she was a mother and how her experiences shaped her, and to see how her daughter navigates the world in respect to what she’s learned from her mother, particularly when she faces unexpected challenges.
JB: There are so many unique threads in Burst, from the sense of place, to triangulating relationships, to a multitude of artistic ambitions, to a variety of physical and mental health issues. The novel covers a lot of timely and relevant ground. What is your process for wrangling so many threads in a book?
MO: Themes that are central to a lot of my writing are women who refuse to be defined by societal or family expectations. Women, who, to quote a Grace Paley title, “face enormous changes at the last minute,” and on a more personal level, I’m interested in exploring the mystery of people’s hidden lives—wonder, shame, longing, and will.
My writing process has to do with being captured by something to the extent that I become somewhat obsessed. This could be an image or line or something I overheard, or something I heard in a dream. Whatever this thing is, I like to write it down on an index card—I like to have something I can hold in my hand. Then, it often seems the world conspires or leans in to offer up further material that connects to the original ideas. After a period of time, I’m fully in the story. I enjoy the feeling of being so deep in a piece of writing that I’m kind of living a double life: my actual life and the life of the story that is hidden, runs parallel to it when I’m working.
So often writing seems to be about intention and availability—not only to the story itself but about availability to daily life that sneaks in around the side and gets in there, too. The trick is that you never know where you will find what, so it’s important to dwell in a place of possibility.
When I’m at my desk I keep my index cards close by and I usually have a couple of legal pads at hand—one that features editing notes, research questions, structural ideas, and line revisions. The other might contain notes on my characters or place. I usually look at these things before I write and sometimes afterward but not when I’m actually writing.
JB: How do you write such nuanced, emotional characters in a humorous way? Do you draw on your own life experiences? What needs to be in place in order for you to produce work?
MO: I once heard that you can’t trust what you don’t understand, and I need to feel some click of inner appreciation or empathy toward a character in order to write that character. I don’t need to have experienced what a character has experienced as long as I have an emotional corollary that I can connect to. In fact, most of what I’ve written about in fiction, while sometimes based on a kernel of an experience or a particular detail, is highly fictionalized. They say that fiction is the lie that tells the truth, and it’s my job to always, above all, find the emotional truth of a situation. I have the instincts of a journalist in terms of research, curiosity, and objectivity, and an actor’s impulse to get inside a character and embody not only their physicality and self-expression, but their internal life and consciousness.
The emotional challenge is to head fully toward something that mainly scares me, frightens me, or gives me great joy. I’ve been surprised to find that the emotion that yanked me into a story in the first place has the ability to crack open another emotion, usually one that I wasn’t expecting. Finding something hilarious that on the face of it seemed tragic comes to mind. My intellectual challenge is to try to learn something I don’t know (or learn something new about something I do know) and share it in a way that readers can deeply connect to.
A number of readers have told me they enjoyed the humor in Burst and found it surprising given the gravity of some of the subject matter. George Saunders has said, “Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.” When I’m being as truthful as possible, I feel that it’s inevitable that some of the situations will be comic. Sometimes in fiction, as in life, humor and sadness travel together, and as a writer, part of my job is to explore that.
JB: Can you elaborate on your research process for Burst?
MO: Although I’d studied some modern dance, it wasn’t something I ever planned to pursue professionally. So, I talked to my dancer friends about teaching methods and various dance techniques. I also viewed the film Pina, about the choreographer, Pina Bausch, during the writing of the novel, and the intensity and velocity of her choreography informed some of the fictionalized dance that I wrote about. The sections of the book that are in the late Sixties also required some study as to popular culture, music, and NYC in that era. Lastly, I needed to research the musical ear syndrome that Charlotte experiences, a phenomenon that is still not understood well.
JB: As a nonfiction writer, I always wonder what it’s like to end a story. To put the lid on a book and leave the characters. Do Charlotte and Viva carry on in your day-to-day life?
MO: It’s true that there can be a kind of sorrow when you’re finished writing about a character or characters, but they will live on in my imagination and certainly, in the novel. It’s funny, but after being alone with these characters for some time, it was almost surprising to be at a book reading or event and have a reader talk to me about them. It was like, “Wait—you know them, too?” Some readers have suggested a sequel to me, and if that is to be the case, I’m sure they’ll let me know. They certainly were insistent the first time.
JB: Do you have a favorite piece of craft advice to share with other writers, or one that you often rely on for yourself?
MO: Trust your subconscious. It will present you with characters and images you never expected, provide subtextual connections beyond reckoning, and solutions you could never have foreseen.